Design

The Best of the First Half

The most popular articles of the first half of the year, sprinkled with a few pieces carefully chosen by the editors.

While this year might well be the year of wearable devices, cloud (again), or DevOps  take your pick  it's above all a year in which the appreciation for developers is resurging. Software is quickly morphing from a support tool for other business activities to the means by which companies differentiate themselves. The suddenly popular observation, "Every company is now a software company," is indeed true for all but the smallest businesses. The result is greater demand for programmers and a greater thirst for information from those developers as they try to keep up with the changes occurring at their workplaces. The first six months of this year saw us slaking this thirst with a special emphasis on programming languages: not only new languages (such as Swift and Nimrod) and the crop of JavaScript alternatives, but major releases of established languages like Java 8.

In addition, we've run deep coverage on C and C++, and of course, we've kept a close eye on all things in .NET programming, including reviews of key new products. Add to this our usual nerd stim, which is my favorite part of Dr. Dobb's, and our annual salary survey, which remains the largest of its kind. In case you missed any of this coverage, below are links to the most popular articles from the first half of this year. Enjoy!

Your Two Cents

Is there anything we missed that you'd really like to see covered? Drop me a line (my address is below) and let me know. We're gearing up to deliver more good content for the second half of the year, so this would be an ideal time to send in your requests and preferences. Thank you!

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Video

This month's Dr. Dobb's Journal

This month,
Dr. Dobb's Journal is devoted to mobile programming. We introduce you to Apple's new Swift programming language, discuss the perils of being the third-most-popular mobile platform, revisit SQLite on Android
, and much more!